Dead languages can also come alive!

It was perhaps Shakespeare’s fault. In his play Julius Caesar, a conspirator, reporting the intention of a likely sympathiser, admits he could not understand him as “it was Greek to me”. Some genius later added Latin to the phrase and these two significant languages began to be dismissed as archaic and obscure. But are they?

Not by a long shot. They may not be spoken any longer in public, but they live on in our daily lives. For it is in them that most of the words we use to describe ourselves and much of everything doing with our politics, society, law, religion, business, education, philosophy, literature, science, culture, were first coined, or are derived.

Republic, vote, consensus, festival, family, jurisprudence, crime, credit (and debit), pupil, morals, discipline, celebrity, machine, ritual, calendar, humour, doctor or even science – the examples of words coming from Latin or Greek, via it, can be endless. And each has a story behind it in the sense of what it first connoted or in the way it became slightly modified to the form we know and use now, and it is these fascinating tales that classicist Peter Jones acquaints us with in his new book Quid Pro Quo. In the book, Peter Jones also takes the reader on a fascinating journey of discovery across a wide span of human activities whose key concepts as expressed in language are linked to Roman civilisation.

Take, for example, vote, a crucial ingredient of democracies. The Latin for vote was suffragium, which gives our suffrage, and “in time, it also took on the meaning ‘influence on behalf of a candidate for election’, and even ‘bribe’!” but our vote derives from Latin votum, “which bore no relation to voting at all: it meant ‘vow, offering, prayer, pious wish’.”